This is the fourth in a series of posts counting down to the release of LiveCompare 2.3.  In this post I’m going to cover LiveCompare’s new project management services.

LiveCompare 2.3 integrates with Basecamp – an online project management service from 37signals.  Basecamp is a mature application (running now for more than 6 years) and counts many of the World’s leading companies as users.  What sets Basecamp apart from other project management systems are:

1)      It is very easy to use.

2)      It supports collaboration.

3)      It offers project management support without process overhead

4)      It is great value

Basecamp is something we’ve used internally to support the development of LiveCompare 2.3.  Basecamp replaced Microsoft Project and the daily chore for our project manager of collecting updates.  Now each team member is responsible for updating Basecamp and ticking off the to-do items as they are completed.

We use the built-in message boards as a way to discuss issues and this has become one of the ‘heartbeats’ of the project.  If we see a lot of comments (or a lack of comments) we can investigate and see whether the team has a clear understanding of what’s required.  We use the built-in writeboards as a way to convey what new functionality is available for testing and to reward the developer that breaks the daily build with the rubber chicken – this is an age old tradition!

Using Basecamp for our own work gives me the confidence to recommend it to LiveCompare customers.

One thing Basecamp doesn’t provide is a project summary or dashboard.  This is something we’ve built through a combination of LiveCompare workflow and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) portal reports.

You run a daily ‘Update Dashboard’ workflow to collect the current Basecamp project stats.  These stats are stored in the LiveCompare workspace database.  The pre-built SSRS reports read the stats and present the summary reports.  For example:

This shows the real progress of LiveCompare 2.3 from inception to near completion.  The report is accessible by everyone (yes, you can restrict access if you like) and updates automatically as the next day’s stats are collected.

In addition to the new LiveCompare action that reads data from Basecamp, there’s an action that writes data to Basecamp.  This is a general purpose action that supports:

·         To-do lists

·         To-do items

·         Resource assignments

The latest LiveCompare SAP upgrade analysis workflows make use of this action to turn the discovered tasks – such as the custom programs that need rework or the standard transactions that should be tested or the required security updates or the impacted interfaces – into Basecamp to-do items.  If you’ve set up a resource pool, LiveCompare will pick from the pool when creating the to-do items.

But this action is not limited to just upgrade analysis.  You can use it with any and every LiveCompare analysis from which you derive a set of tasks.  Equally you can use the Basecamp dashboard stats collector and reports with any and every kind of Basecamp project.

One other change was needed to support the integration with Basecamp – how to connect to a specific Basecamp project.  To do that we added a new Basecamp object to the administration hierarchy:

I’ve configured three Basecamp projects in LiveCompare.  Only LiveCompare administrators may configure Basecamp project objects.

Working with the Read Basecamp and Write Basecamp actions I select from one of the configured projects using the special property editor:

Summary

LiveCompare 2.3 introduces new project management services through integration with a leading online project management solution – Basecamp.  Basecamp provides the right amount of project management support without any process overhead.  Collaboration is at the heart of Basecamp: online access, message boards, writeboards, etc.  LiveCompare adds workflow actions for writing data (to-do lists, to-do items, resource assignment, etc.) to Basecamp and reading project stats that are then surfaced in SSRS summary reports.  The LiveCompare upgrade templates use these actions to turn the discovered tasks into to-do items.  The LiveCompare/Basecamp actions and dashboard can be used with any type of SAP lifecycle activity.